There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. -Henry Miller-
with huey and dylan gone, my life lately has largely revolved around my family. anyone knowing our family history would agree that we are as dysfunctional as any other happy american family with a healthy handful of neuroses thrown in for good measure. while i've sometimes been desicribed as the "normal" one in my family, i usually just shrug this off... i think i can be plenty weird myself, but what people don't know won't hurt them, right?
well, this weekend my family came very close to driving me over the edge into their crazy little worlds. it was a big moving weekend for my mom... we rented a moving truck on sunday and i'd spent most of the day friday lugging furniture from two bedrooms in the old house, down the hall and into the living room for two reasons: to facilitate its loading once the truck arrived and to give my mom two full rooms as staging points for the removal of the 27 years of crap that has accumulated in her own bedroom.
when i say crap, i'm not kidding. unfortunately, i arrived on sunday to find that she had packed two boxes completely and was still in the process of filling a third with shoes and purses. very frustrated, i got the boys started with the stuff in the living room i'd already done and went to help her. thirty minutes later, after they had completely cleared out the living room, i was still standing in my mom's room arguing over whether or not a calorie guide published in 1967 was really worth keeping. on top of that, everything i threw into the trash bag she would pull back out to look over again. the woman has JARS of buttons tucked into drawers all over her room... i don't remember the last time i saw her sew on a button. and it isn't like she collects them... she just hates to throw them away.
anyway, the boys were ready to move on to her furniture so drastic measures had to be taken. i shooed her out of the room, grabbed a few boxes and literally began to arm-sweep items off of her dresser into the box. the amount of dust on everything was ridiculous... it literally came off in clumps like when you clean the lint trap on your dryer... except this was dust, not clothing lint. blech. they joked about getting me one of those dust masks you see carpenters wearing as i slowly became enveloped in the cloud of dust.
after that, it came down to clearing a path to the other furniture items in the room. yes, i mean clear a path literally... she has stuff stacked at least knee deep all over the room. cereal... 27 years worth of stuff just stacked up everywhere. we started by trying to gingerly shift things and keep it organized (as if it was organized to start with) but frustration set in after a turned ankle or two from trying to leap over it all so we just began shoveling it around. after a lot of digging and dusting and tugging and pulling (and probably a few broken things hidden under the piles of stuff we stepped on) we managed to get it all out. here is what the room looked like after the furniture was out and i had already dragged four boxes of stuff out of there...
it's actually quite a scary picture when you realize that those small bits of blue carpet poking out are where the furniture was and that all this other stuff on the floor was just stacked around it... madness...
after unloading all the stuff at the new house we finally headed home at about 8 o'clock. the only things left in the truck, besides our dolly, were the washer and dryer which had been left in the powder springs house by the old owners and which my mom replaced with her fancier newer ones.
now see if you can follow me here, because this is where it gets tricky. the washer/dryer from the old house goes to the new house, where the plug from the old house dryer goes onto the new house dryer and vice versa, then the new house w/d are brought to the old house for a week or so until angel brings her apt w/d to the old house (where the new house washer and dryer are) and trades them out, taking the new house w/d from the old house to her apt and leaving the apt w/d in the old house because she called dibs on the new house w/d which are newer than the apt w/d. *whew*
problem is, angel didn't come help out yesterday with the move at all. she had aids walk. so now the boys think they are entitled to the new house w/d instead of having to take angel's older, more used apt w/d. what doesn't help matters is that they swear up and down that they expressed this to my mom as she was on her way to pick up dinner and that she agreed... she, of course, doesn't remember having this conversation at all. so who's right? should angel get to keep her dibs call? or should the boys get the better set for making the extra effort? apparently this issue resulted in a terrific screaming match after i left my mom's house last night and then my phone literally EXPLODED with calls as everyone wanted me to persuade someone else to change their mind. i personally don't see what the big deal is... but then again, it isn't really my problem.
i spent about two hours last night twisting my brain this way and that, bouncing from one call on hold to another before i finally gave up and just stopped answering. i just can't get that worked up over this and don't understand how everyone else can. i swear, they are all completely crazy...
anyway, here are some of the other pics i took yesterday on my camera phone. this first one is colin messin around in what i affectionaly began to call the "dirty room" by the end of the day (my mom's room). we couldn't decide if it was a Where's Waldo kind of shot (it's hard to see colin in his camo amidst all the crap) or if it looks like he's actually being swallowed into it all.
and here are the boys with the very full, very pain in the ass to pack moving truck... we done good :o)
